It’s been about two weeks since Curry Shop Shimizu opened for business in the Chitose-Funabashi area of Tokyo. Considering the only dish they sell is a curry which mimics the taste of human feces, you might expect sales to have been slow.

However, not only is business booming, the demand has become too much for owner and adult film star Shimiken to keep up. As a result he put out an ad for interns to help take his poopy curry to the next level. On top of that, if you thought Curry Shop Shimizu’s fortunes couldn’t get any better, they are attracting top-tier applicants on par with the nation’s leading corporations.

Once relegated to menial tasks like mousing or appearing in commercials, cats have been recently begun making huge inroads to other labor sectors such as service industries. Pioneer felines like Tama the station master and his successor Nitama along with Kuzya the assistant librarian cat at Novorossiysk Library in Russia.

Granted, those are only three, but those three cats alone amount to a staggering 7,560-percent increase in the employment rate for the species as a whole from the previous decade. And now one workspace in Tokyo is trying to get ahead of this trend by recruiting a cat for a management position. Humans need not apply.

For many young people in Japan, August means summer vacation, festivals and free time. For fourth-year university students however, it means time to start interviewing for jobs. The job-hunting process in Japan is long, grueling and very systematic, culminating in interview after interview for the jobless, soon-to-graduate, young adults.

Interviews can be nerve-wracking for even the most experienced candidates, but Japanese companies don’t always ask the most predictable questions. In fact, some of their questions can be downright weird. Many of these oddball interview questions, however, may not actually be legal.

Last year, we reported on the berating talents of model and TV personality Risa Yoshiki in her series I Want Risa Yoshiki to be Angry at Me on TV Tokyo. In the series of short videos, Yoshiki unleashes a non-stop tirade of insults and complaints at you the viewer.

Now she’s back and with many graduates just entering the workforce this season, she has a new series titled For New Employees: I Want Risa Yoshiki to be Angry at Me. In it she brings many tidings such as “YOU WORTHLESS BASTARD, YOU SUCK AS A MEMBER OF SOCIETY.”

The world economy has taken a pretty big hit since 2007, and every country is doing what it can to recover. Some have been able to do better than others, but for most people, they haven’t gotten back to pre-crash numbers, whatever that may be.

While unemployment numbers have steadily decreased in the US, Japan has its own unique set of economic problems to deal with. With an unemployment rate sitting at 3.6 percent as of September 2014, an entirely different sort of problem is rearing its ugly head here. How can a low unemployment rate cause problems? For that answer, we have to turn to the parents.

As far as things not to say in an interview go, you’d think it’d be pretty high up on the list. But the young Japanese university student, rejected by all the other companies he’d applied to, was prepared to take the risk. “This company is the only option I have left,” he pleaded with the interviewer. “I’ll do anything!” An unusual strategy, certainly. But he got the job.

Japanese site Niconico News reports that the man is now entering his ninth year of employment with the company, so it seems the gamble paid off. But is the company’s positive reaction so unusual? Some Japanese employability experts are arguing that, for many companies, the ideal graduate recruit is a “hakushi” – a blank page that the company can do what they want with. When companies train new recruits extensively, an across-the-board willingness to learn is valued more than previous experience.

When people visit Japan, they often marvel at how great the service everywhere is. Trains run on time; a guy pops out of a little hatch like a station ninja when you’re struggling with a ticket vending machine; packages come precisely when they’re supposed to, and even if you miss them you can just call the driver on their mobile phone to arrange a new delivery time.

Day in, day out, stuff just works. And yet, unlike the many foreigners who live here, native Japanese take this all completely in their stride. Take this video, for example, which was taken by a foreigner living and uploaded to YouTube a couple of weeks ago…

With technology moving faster than ever, it’s hard to imagine what careers will look like 20 years from now. But The Canadian Scholarship Trust Plan (CST), a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to helping Canadian families save for their children’s post-secondary education, wanted to find out.

With help from foresight strategists, CST took a look into the future to find the jobs that may be commonplace by the year 2030.

The Japanese division of Swedish furniture chain IKEA recently announced that they will make large changes to their job descriptions including the elimination of fixed-term contracts for part-time workers.

The new job descriptions are said to begin this September and aim to create equal treatment for their 3,400 employees in Japan. Reports suggest that they may raise the salaries of all part-time staff who make up 70% of the company’s work force.

Law enforcement continues to be a popular career choice in Japan. Outside of the obvious risks involved it’s a stable job compared to the corporate rat race. However, people who are simply interested in job security often aren’t the ideal candidates to become police officers. Incidence of resignation is on the rise in the forces across Japan, with disgruntled men and women alike citing “being tired of chasing people” and “scary” crime scenes as reasons for leaving.

Combine this with the impending mass retirement of the baby boom generation, and police are facing a significant human resources crisis in the near future. So they have recently been looking at new ways to hook new, and more importantly the right kind of, candidates.

“I hate this job.” Not exactly uncommon words, are they? While you may not necessarily love the work you do, it’s always nice to at least not hate your job, right? Unfortunately, it seems that all too many of us are stuck in life-draining professions, wishing we could start all over. And, it turns out, over half of young “irregular” Japanese workers can sympathize.

Cats often get a bad rep for being lazy and selfish, but in fact they can back it up with a stellar job performance when necessary. For example, I once saw a cat swat and eat a cockroach in mid-flight. According to various industry insiders, employers hate cockroaches. Now that’s a valuable skill to add to any organization!

This is a fact of life that no one knows better than Russia. Their State Hermitage Museum is staffed by a team of cats who protect its treasures from vermin around the clock – or the sections of the clock they’re awake.

Even on the local level we now have Kuzya the tabby who is swiftly making his way up the ladder at a Novorossiysk Library. Coming straight off the streets he has already assumed the role of assistant librarian, and many are tipping him to be running the whole facility before long.

On 20 May the International Labor Organization (ILO) released their Global Employment Trends for Youth 2013 report which outlines the employment environment for people aged 15 to 29 in nations around the world.

Among the statistic were NEET rates among 34 OECD countries’ young people. A NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) rate is the percentage of youth who are not working or in school of any kind.

On average, 15.8 percent of tens and young adults fall in this category in developed countries. The following is a full list of the studied countries.